There is a touch of genius about this man. To a listener who has known most of these songs since childhood and heard them well performed innumerable times, it comes – not quite as a revelation, because one always sensed they had a life outside the normal condition and character of those performances – but more as the fulfilment of a deeply felt wish, instinctive rather than consciously formed. As in all the best Lieder singing, everything is specific: "Fly away, breath" we recite, thinking nothing of it, but with this singer it is visual – we see it in flight, just as in Sea Fever we know in the very tiniest of gaps that in that second he has heard "the seagulls crying". As in all the best singing of songs, whatever the nationality, there is strong, vivid communication: he will sometimes sing so softly that if he had secured anything less than total involvement he would lose us. There is breadth of phrase, variety of tone, alertness of rhythm, all the musical virtues are there; and yet that seems to go only a little way towards accounting for what is special.

In more detail then. Bredon Hill: "a happy noise to hear" is the robust observation of a fulfilled and carefree man, "and come to church in time" is exultant hubris, "I hear you" has anger in it, "I will come" resentful submission. Finzi's "O mistress mine": "in delay there lies no plenty" is the free, open-throated call of lovers to make time run (since we can't make it stand still), and "Youth's a stuff will not endure" is a lightly intimated memento mori, half seriousness, half joke. "When I was one-and-twenty" (A Shropshire Lad): the "wise man" who pedalled his tuppeny-ha'penny thought-for-the-day is a pompous loud-mouth, "but oh tis true" has the groan of acknowledgement, and the repeated "tis true" comes from the private recesses of the soul, which knows it is!

One after another, these songs are brought to a full life. There is a boldness about Terfel's art that could be perilous (and he stands on the brink throughout A Shropshire Lad's "Is my team ploughing?"), but which, as exercised here, is marvellously well guided by musicianship, intelligence and the genuine flash of inspiration. Malcolm Martineau's playing is also a delight: his touch, in its way, is as sure and illuminating as the singer's. From the recording I would have preferred less hall-reverberance around the voice. From the songs themselves I could not possibly wish anything more: hearing them performed like this I wouldn't swap them for half the German song repertoire or the whole of the French.